


Incursion

by zozo



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Thor is totally fine, Tony's Aunt Peggy, biofeedback
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 21:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3356681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zozo/pseuds/zozo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The suit’s microphones pick up a woman’s voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incursion

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fanfic I’ve written since 2006, I think, and the first thing I’ve ever posted to AO3. If I’ve made any obvious n00b mistakes, please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy!
> 
> (Previously titled _hey darling, you’re not home/this is your phone, though, right?_ )

`Sir...`

JARVIS sends the usual alerts through the interface with Tony’s nervous system, but it’s the tone of the AI’s voice—a modulation Tony can’t remember programming—that makes his skin crawl. `Sir, the device has been activated.`

Readouts flash on the HUD of the suit even as Tony sends a swarm of hunter-sleeper darts towards a pair of idiots advancing on Natasha’s position. There’s… a hole. Not a 2D Looney Tunes-style cartoon hole, though it looks like a circle straight on, but the patterns of energy currents JARVIS has overlaid reveal it to be a sphere—a hole in space.

The suit’s microphones pick up a woman’s voice—not Natasha’s, a voice with a British accent, a voice that inexplicably makes Tony think of bergamot and rosewater while he lines up the meathead grappling with Thor for a one-eighth–power repulsor blast—just enough to knock him into the harbor with a few distracting first-degree burns.

And then three things happen very quickly: Thor, impatient for Tony’s air support, lets go of the meathead’s left arm to call Mjollnir into his hand. The meathead, instead of wasting time punching Thor in the face, pulls something off of his own belt buckle. And Tony’s HUD fritzes out for a nauseous six tenths of a second, and comes back just in time for him to see Mjollnir hit the shallow crater of dirt where Thor and the meathead had been standing, and grok the biofeedback signal to the edge of his subconscious: two combatants suddenly removed from the scene. One new arrival.

Tony swivels to spot whoever’d dropped in at the same time Thor had dropped out—and hopefully not for good, Tony isn’t emotionally prepared to deal with that at _all_ —and the suit’s cameras resolve on a shorter Caucasian woman with a mass of dark hair and a dark blue pantsuit, standing up about ten feet away from the spherical hole in—

`_Sir_.` JARVIS’s voice does it again, another nuance Tony didn’t put there on purpose… and then he sees why.

It’s his Aunt Peggy, but younger than he is now—by at least a decade, oh Jesus—pulling herself to her feet, looking weary for just a moment, then crouching into a combat stance like the goddess of destruction Tony has always assumed she’d been in her prime.

A loud ping from JARVIS comes in on his six, and Tony twists around again to discover he’s not the only asshole who showed up to this party in a mechanical suit. This one looks like more the power-loader from Aliens; Tony’s is still the prettiest, but this thing’s alarmingly nimble, and it’s coming up on him fast.

JARVIS amplifies Peggy’s voice for him: “Move!” she shouts, her crouch having already turned into a run, coming straight for him. Tony, head swimming again with sense memories (Earl Grey tea, and the perfume she and his mother both wore), obeys like he would have as a sullen, twitchy 12-year-old, and boosts himself out of her path.

Peggy makes a beeline straight to the bowl-shaped imprint where that bodybuilding reject somehow kidnapped Thor—Tony hopes the prick is getting his ass kicked in some pocket dimension right now, hammer or no—and oh shit, the horrifyingly young version of Tony’s no-bullshit war-hero aunt is _picking up Thor’s fucking hammer_ , the one Tony has tripped over by accident twice and as a joke fifty or sixty times, because of course he can’t make it budge, he has enough self-awareness to accept—

“JARVIS, you’re saving this telemetry, right?”

`At maximum resolution, Sir. Onboard memory will reach capacity in about 12 minutes.`

Tony raises his hand repulsors in case this insanity doesn’t work, but he grew up hearing stories about Peggy Carter, The Woman Who Taught Captain America How to Fight, and he's seen Captain America fight. He doesn’t even power them up.

Peggy ducks under the hydraulic clamp at the end of the power-loader’s right arm and swings Mjollnir like it’s a NERF toy into the machine’s closest knee, which splits like magnesium. The loader pivots too far at the waist to swing the pile driver on its left arm, which she bashes away from its body at the shoulder, with a two-handed swing and a half-bellow, half-shriek. The machine, having sustained too much damage, powers down, trapping the pilot inside. Someone will have to pry him out later and read him his rights.

Things suddenly seem quiet. Tony surveys the battlefield. Thor’s still MIA, but Tony might be able to salvage some readings from around the gap in his suit’s systems that would help him and Bruce bring the big guy home, as long as there’s somewhere to bring him home _from_. Natasha is literally standing on a heap of bodies, trying to get a signal on her bulky satellite phone to call in a SHIELD cleanup crew. Clint’s still up in his sniper’s perch, taking his time about climbing down. And Captain America is two miles southwest, chasing down the intel on this dimensional hole-puncher that the lead scientist had managed to escape with. He won’t be gone long.

Tony’s seen enough Star Trek to be worried about fucking up the timeline, but he can’t just… He lands the suit in front of Peggy, who casts a last look at the remains of the power-loader and bends at her knees to set the hammer down on the ground. She looks at Tony warily, but Tony senses she hasn’t flagged him as an enemy. Yet. He thinks about popping open the helmet, not quite a command, and feels a resistant reluctance from JARVIS on the surface of his skin. Instead of thinking about it, he overrides it with one of his finger switches, feeling just for a second like a petulant little boy.

Peggy jumps as the faceplace hisses up, but somehow it doesn’t disrupt her composure. Tony’s actually disarmed a little—even at this age, without the steely grey in her hair, the power of her presence is breathtaking. “Hi,” he says.

`Sir, I must protest--` says JARVIS to the open air, and Aunt Peggy gets a queasy look in her eyes. She looks down at Tony’s suit, then back up at his face, then _really_ at his face, and then she rocks her weight away from him, off balance just a little. She licks her lips.

“This is… I’m in the future, aren’t I.”

“Um,” says Tony. “Yeah.”

Her eyes flash. “Don’t you say another word. I don’t want to know a thing. I’m going back while I still can.” She balls her fists at her sides, twists on her heel, and starts marching back to the hole in time, which looks a lot less three-dimensional with his helmet open. It looks like something out of Looney Tunes.

“Okay, good call, I—”

She shoots him a glare over her shoulder—the very glare, no doubt, that shriveled the testicles of Steve Rogers himself, once upon a time. Tony’s been wary of that glare his entire life. He doesn’t say another word, just watches his father’s best friend, the woman who hasn’t recognized him as anyone but Howard in years, stride like a pin-striped valkyrie back into history.

Steve can never know.


End file.
